MANILA, June 26 — A new study reveals that a third of the world’s top fintech websites are essentially invisible to the AI agents that increasingly power search and information retrieval. For communities across Asia that rely on digital financial services, this could mean being locked out of the next wave of online discovery. The research, published on May 25 by conversion specialist Slobodan Manic, measured 274 fintech homepages from the CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies 2025 list.
Manic made two sequential measurements on each site: a raw HTTP fetch with no JavaScript execution, and a full browser render. The gap between the two readings is the gap an AI agent has to close on its own.
Thirty-six percent of these websites force it to do that work for the most important page on the property. What does this mean for families across the region? When a parent in Manila or a small business owner in Jakarta searches for a loan or a digital wallet, an AI agent may simply skip a fintech company whose homepage delivers less than 80% of its content in raw HTML.
That version of the page is what the agent gets before it decides whether to spend the compute on a full browser render. Most of them do not.
The core issue is what Manic calls “rendering independence.” The Structure pillar of Machine-First Architecture states that critical information must not depend on client-side JavaScript. Until last week this was a design principle. Now it is a number, and the number is uncomfortable.
Closer to home, this matters because fintech has become a lifeline for unbanked and underbanked populations across Southeast Asia. If the very companies offering these services are not optimized for AI agents, they risk being invisible in the search results people increasingly use. Most AI visibility coverage focuses on schema markup, structured content, and brand authority signals.
But this study points to a more fundamental problem: the raw HTML itself. For the fintech sector, where trust and accessibility are everything, the message is clear.
If your homepage cannot speak to an AI agent without JavaScript, you are not speaking to the next generation of customers at all.
